Jim Hightower

No wonder George W's approval rating has fallen below that for Mad Cow disease – he keeps treating the public like we have the cognitive ability of turnips!

He recently insulted the public's intelligence with two blatantly false claims about his disastrous Iraq policy. First was Bush's comical assertion that he's the agent of change in this war. He declared that voters last November said they "wanted change in our strategy in Iraq. I listened. Today, General David Petraeus is carrying out a strategy that is dramatically different from our previous course."

Hoo boy! Bush previously told us he was "The Decider," then "The Commander Guy," but now he's reinvented himself as "The Listener." Well, listen up, George – we were born at night, but it wasn't last night! Your so-called "surge" strategy is the same old failure with a new coat of PR on it. People were voting last November to bring the troops home, not to send more to Iraq. Two-thirds of Americans oppose your surge.

Then, when congressional Democrats dared to express the will of the people by setting deadlines for withdrawal from Iraq, Bush shamefully tried to wrap his bad policy in a military cloak. The Democrats' bill, he wailed, would mean that "America’s commanders in the middle of a combat zone would have to take fighting directions from politicians 6,000 miles away in Washington, DC."

Yoo-hoo, George... You're a politician! Everyone knows that you and your neo-con political cohorts designed every aspect of this war – against the best advice of the commanders. You chose to go there, you fumbled the planning, you bumbled the occupation, you got America’s military stuck in Iraq's vicious civil war – and now you want to dump responsibility for this mess on the military commanders?

While the time of Bush's presidency is dwindling, Bush himself is shrinking in front of our very eyes.